Extendible OS X search agent targets deals on Craig’s List, Ebay & more
This is an interesting piece of software. It allows you to search eBay and Craig's List from your desktop. As time progresses, they promise to have additional sites available.
Black Pixel Luminance has released Agent Craig, an internet search agent for OS X Leopard that helps users respond quickly to new ads posted on Craig's List as well as Ebay auctions.
The software runs as a background application, providing an unobtrusive way to look out for items of interest during work or at home. Discrete pop-up messages notify the user of new results matching their search terms, and each search campaign can be customized with a distinct audio alert.
"We needed Agent Craig for ourselves and could tell early on that it was going to be a popular tool," said Dan Pasco, Black Pixel's CEO, "we look at contract gigs for our professional services group on Craig's List, but we needed a way to poll for ads instead of checking them manually. We also needed better ways to track the status of jobs we had applied for."
Users can browse search results matching their criteria, annotate results with notes for future reference, and blacklist search results deemed irrelevant to prevent them from showing up in subsequently defined search queries.
"We are excited by the potential of Agent Craig," said Black Pixel director of engineering David Brown, "The extensibility provided by the API is allowing us to take it in directions we hadn't anticipated. There is certainly more to it than meets the eye."
Although presented as a tool primarily intended for bargain hunters, the software is highly extensible via its plugin API. Black Pixel is currently working on new plugins capable of taking the application to a much broader market, and 3rd party developers can write add-ons of their own as well.
I tried searching for iMacs for sale here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on Craig's list and came up with several recent listings. I then looked for Ford Trucks and Dell Notebooks. I would like to be able to put in a price range but couldn't discover how to do it. I was able to enter a model year when searching for the truck, but couldn't figure out how to do a range of model years.
The other issue I have is that that the web site appears to offer only the pay version, but a trial version is available by clicking on the down arrow that will do the download without clicking on the Buy Now button. However the price does look quite reasonable.
It will be interesting to see if they extend this application to the iPhone in June.
Pricing and Availability: Agent Craig sells for $29.99 and is available for evaluation and purchase at the Black Pixel Luminance website.
Black Pixel Luminance: http://blackpixelluminance.com.
Agent Craig: http://blackpixelluminance.com/agentcraig.html.
Direct Download Link: http://blackpixelluminance.com/updates/AgentCraig_1.0.dmg.
Black Pixel Luminance is a software development group focused exclusively on iPhone and Mac software development. The group, which was founded in February 2008, has created Agent Craig, a collaborative task management application known as Aria, and two yet-to-be-announced applications for the Apple iPhone.
------------------------------
Got News?
We'd love to hear about your news, software or hardware discoveries... just post at: our review input forms
del.icio.us... 
------------------------------
